Is my team striking? Making an executive team pull together

Source: Exec Digital UK

Date :10/03/2008 16:07:56

Getting an executive team together and making it work may not be fantasy football, but it can make a business stand or fall – and it’s not that different from sport either

By John O’Hanlon

‘Our people are our greatest asset’ is the tiredest old cliché in the book. Everyone says it, but few really buy into it. One CEO put it rather better when asked his priority: “My balance sheet walks out of the door on a Friday: my job is to make sure it comes back on Monday morning.”

For nobody is this truer than for Karren Brady, Managing Director of Birmingham City Football Club. Her assets are a bunch of overpaid prima donnas. As a woman in a man’s world - and let’s face it, most boardrooms are still boys’ clubs - she says men are easy to manipulate when you know the secret; “As a species they are entirely predictable.”

But she eschews manipulation, or coercion for that matter, when it comes to getting teams to work together either on the pitch or on the boardroom. The former is the job of the manager, the latter is hers. “The FIFO* style of management is normal in football, but I believe in letting people do things their way,” she says – something she proved early on by sticking with her first manager Barry Fry while admitting that she couldn’t understand where he was coming from.

People don’t work for money: if that’s what they do, they shouldn’t. But the attitude ‘I pay you, so do what I want’ is difficult to get away from because it suits the conservative and lazy employee as much as the power mad boss. Most people still talk about the work/life balance as if the two were distinct, and regard the time they spend at work as having been ‘sold’ to the company. It’s an attitude ripe for disruption.

Change hurts

Where the leadership culture of a company is work life integration rather than balance, other more important motivations come to the fore and people can’t get their head around change. “Every day is difficult if you’re running a team of people,” Karren Brady admits. “Change is difficult for people and they are scared of it.”

Like Brady, Louisa Fletcher, founder and MD of the online property valuation company Property Price Advice went straight from school into business. She has always had a pragmatic approach to team building. Like many startup entrepreneurs she ran the show from her dining room until she absolutely had to bring people in. It gave her a taste for lean management, for drawing together virtual teams when a project needs doing, and for networking...

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